


The Sun, The Stars;

by tolstayas



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, unrequited lesbian crush on unavailable best friend - freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 06:57:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13141431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tolstayas/pseuds/tolstayas
Summary: "She was perfect, and Amilyn had a soft heart, and that was how it went."Musings, scattered.





	The Sun, The Stars;

**Author's Note:**

> my gf is the best beta reader on the face of this earth, thanks for coming to my ted talk

It was nothing new at first. The same catch in the breath, the same beats the heart always skips at the sight of something pretty. She would look at Leia a little too long, think about her a little too often, invent accidents to brush hands together. She lived for that ephemeral blaze of wrists and eyes and smiles - she always had. Amilyn was always in love, had fallen in love so many times she’d lost count. When she wasn’t in love with a person, it was a constellation, a language, a colour. Passion was her constant.

So it was nothing new.

Leia was beautiful, in that powerful way Amilyn had always found so enchanting in women. Strong, commanding, competent in her work - but also desperately kind, full of love for the world. Everyone in the Apprentice Legislature then was a bit of a rebel, so to speak, but she was spunkier than most, and witty. She could be very funny, in a fiery way. Amilyn thought she was perfect - frowned a little as she thought it, giggled at herself, but thought it nonetheless. She was a princess, after all. Perfection was her duty, and her birthright.

She was perfect, and Amilyn had a soft heart, and that was how it went. Bold as she was, Amilyn didn’t try anything - it was above her station, back then, only sixteen, what with her royal blood, the distance between them.

Amilyn loved easily, and she was easy enough to please. All she wanted was to make Leia proud. She agonized over outfits in the mornings, biting her nails over mauve and turquoise and flame orange. She tore up her knees on the boulders of Eriadu and the scaly tree trunks of muggy Felucia, breaking nails and scraping palms to keep up with the princess. People who saw the two of them in senatorial sessions together must have thought they were bitter rivals, with the way they leapt to follow each other up.

She remembered inane things, sunlight on Leia’s eyelashes, the crinkles around her eyes when she laughed, the flush in her cheeks when she got excited. She rewound footage of the Day of Demand over and over - she was weak for ceremony, weak for Leia. She stayed up late, stargazing. She plotted Leia’s birth charts against her own, cross-examined and fantasized. Leia bit her lip when she was thinking; Amilyn’s heart fluttered.

They - as a plural noun, a togetherness - they existed, she supposed, fitfully. There were moments of them, snatches.

Leia would stretch out a hand to help Amilyn over a jagged boulder or a tree stump and not let go, hold tight even once the pair were out in the open.

They would get lost and sleep uncovered under the stars of a warm summer night, and tell secrets.

They would smile at each other and Amilyn would look down at Leia's lips and look up again and their eyes would lock.

Leia had said something about her eyes once. The blue of them. And galaxies. The sun, the stars; Amilyn had wanted to shout, had wanted to confess, but didn't. Didn't dare. Amilyn had never been afraid of death, but love - love could terrify her.

Leia was generous about her eccentricities. She even said she found them charming, though Amilyn rolled her eyes at that - hopeful heart ablaze. They got close. They talked. They talked about everything - well, just about everything. Of course the princess had secrets, but the demands of secrecy were flexible, at least around Amilyn. They were thick as thieves, complicit and intimate. It was all Amilyn could have asked for.

Years passed, and of course in her own way she found new passions - little candles, little glows that led her through it all. But soon enough she was back at Leia’s side, and it all rushed over her again, perhaps because what in love tended to be illusory and artificial, in her case, was genuine and permanent; or perhaps just because she missed it all, missed whispering at the Apprentice Legislature, missed scrambling hand in hand up steep hillsides into the red light of sunrise. Missed being young and in love.

Because the truth of it was this: for all her loves, for all her studies, for all her dreaming - it was always Leia. It was always Leia, when Amilyn described the tint of the world changing or the texture of the light shifting, who understood her - even if she wouldn't stand for it, even if she complained and begged her not to be so horribly abstract. It was always Leia who made her smile and who made her cry and who made her a human being, at least, at the end of the day.

It was always Leia whose stars she hoped would align with her own.

The gut feeling of it was different, perhaps, softened by age, worn smooth. Like a brass doorknob - odd way to speak of love - or a wedding ring forty, fifty years old, scuffed and shining. Like a boulder in the sea, soaked in the salt of life, brushed by the winds of passing passions, kissed by the sands of time.

But she still woke up in the morning thinking she could hear Leia's voice just outside the door. Still, tired and overburdened, she rested her chin in her hands and closed her eyes and dreamed of her. It was still a sense of awe - awe at the beauty of her, really, at the beauty of bright eyes and grey hair and smile lines; her composure and her grief, her strength and her sorrow.

And after all that time Amilyn was still sixteen and still sighing over a wisp of hair Leia had tucked behind her ear, a glint of a smile at something she had said. After all that time she still wanted to stay right where she was and be close to Leia, be what Leia needed her to be. And it was as if nothing had changed, after all. It was as if they had never been apart. It was as if, as if... after all that time, it was as if she was still in love.


End file.
